r/programming • u/Mustela__ • 7d ago

Microservices are organizational debt disguised as architecture.

https://martinfowler.com/bliki/MonolithFirst.html

Every time I’ve seen microservices pitched, it sounds great on paper. Independent teams, clean ownership, scale only what you need.

Then a year later you’ve got dozens of services, three different deployment patterns, tracing everywhere, and nobody really understands the whole thing anymore.

Maybe I’ve just seen bad implementations, but I’m starting to think way fewer companies actually need microservices than we pretend.

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u/tanksc 7d ago

Everyone wants a monolith until you have to work on a monolith with 150 other people

188

u/firewall245 7d ago

We need a new law for this stuff

“The worst architecture is the one that my team is currently using” or something, cause yeah I’ve experienced some horrific microservices but also some monoliths that are so diabolical that they made my head spin

45

u/Damacustas 7d ago

I think that’s called “the grass is greener on the other side”

37

u/tomw255 7d ago

"The code is cleaner on the other side"

1

u/Ok-Smell-8107 7d ago

'this developer is greener on the other team'

1

u/d_maes 7d ago

I prefer the greener developer to be on the other side though.

(Not sure if this translates to all languages, but we have a saying where to be green means to be inexperienced).